01.01.12: George, John, Paul & Ringo (1957 - 1970)

Blow The Heart Wide Open

'If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'' - John Lennon

The origin of the phenomenon that became the Beatles can be traced to 1957 when
Paul successfully
auditioned at a church fête in Woolton, Liverpool, for the guitarist's
position in the Quarry Men, a skiffle group led by
John Lennon (b. John Winston Lennon,
9 October 1940, Liverpool, England, d. 8 December 1980, New York, USA).

Within a year, two more musicians had been brought in, the
15-year-old guitarist
George Harrison (b. 25 February 1943, Liverpool, England, d. 29 November 2001,
Los Angeles, California, USA) and an art school friend of Lennon's,
Stuart Sutcliffe
(b. 23 June 1940, Edinburgh, Scotland, d. 10 April 1962, Hamburg, Germany).

After a brief spell as Johnny And The Moondogs, the band rechristened
themselves the Silver Beetles, and, in April 1960, played
before impresario Larry Parnes, winning the dubious distinction of a
support slot on an arduous tour of Scotland with autumnal idol Johnny Gentle. By the
summer of 1960 the group had a new name, the Beatles, dreamed up by Lennon who
said "a man in a flaming pie appeared and said you shall be Beetles with an a".

A full-time drummer, Pete Best
(b. 1941, Liverpool, England), was recruited and they secured a residency at
Bruno Koschminder's Indra Club in Hamburg. It was during this period
that they honed their repertoire of R&B and rock 'n' roll favourites, and during
exhausting six-hour sets performed virtually every song they could remember.

Already,
the musical/lyrical partnership of Lennon/McCartney was bearing fruit,
anticipating a body of work unparalleled in modern popular music.

The image
of the group was changing, most noticeably with their fringed haircuts or, as
they were later known, the "mop-tops', the creation of Sutcliffe's German fiancée
Astrid Kirchherr.

The first German trip ended when the
under-age Harrison was deported in December 1960 and the others lost
their work permits. During this turbulent period, they also parted
company with manager Allan Williams, who had arranged many of their early gigs.
Following a couple of months" recuperation, the group reassembled
for regular performances at the Cavern Club in Liverpool and briefly returned to
Germany where they performed at the Top Ten club and
backed Tony Sheridan on the single.

Meanwhile, Sutcliffe decided to leave the group and stay in Germany as a
painter. The more accomplished McCartney then took up the bass guitar.
This part of their career is well documented in the 1994 feature film
Backbeat.

'That's when we decided to stop in '66. Everyone thought we toured for years, you know, but we didn't. I joined in '62, and we'd finished touring in '66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other... and create any fantasy that came out of anybody's brain.' - Ringo Starr

In November 1961,
Brian Epstein, the manager of North End Music Store,
a record shop in Liverpool, became interested in the group after
he received dozens of requests from customers for the
Tony Sheridan record,
My Bonnie. He went to see the Beatles play at the Cavern and soon
afterwards became their manager. Despite
Epstein's
enthusiasm, several major record companies passed on the Beatles, although the
group were granted an audition with Decca Records on New Year's Day 1962. After
some prevarication, the A&R department, headed by Dick Rowe, rejected the group
in favour of Brian Poole And The Tremeloes. Other companies were even
less enthusiastic than Decca, which had at least taken the
group seriously enough to finance a recording session.

On 10 April, further bad news was forthcoming when the group heard that
Stuart Sutcliffe had died in Hamburg of a brain haemorrhage (the book on Sutcliffe The Beatles' Shadow: Stuart Sutcliffe and His Lonely Hearts Club by his sister, Pauline, is a fascinating read and
available at amazon).
The
following day, the Beatles flew to Germany and opened a seven-week
engagement at Hamburg's Star Club.
By May, Epstein
had at last found a Beatles convert in EMI Records producer
George Martin, who
signed the group to the Parlophone Records label. Three months later,
drummer
Pete Best was
sacked; although he had looked the part, his drumming was poor. An
initial protest was made by his considerable army of fans back in Liverpool.

His replacement was Ringo Starr (b. Richard Starkey,
7 July 1940, Dingle, Liverpool, England), the extrovert and locally popular
drummer from Rory Storm And The Hurricanes. Towards the end of
1962, the Beatles broke through to the UK charts with their
debut single,
Love Me Do,
and played the Star Club for the final time. The debut was important,
as it was far removed from the traditional "beat combo" sound, and Lennon's use of a
harmonica made the song stand out. At this time,
Epstein
signed a contract with the music publisher Dick James, which led to the
formation of Northern Songs.

On 13 February 1963 the Beatles appeared on
UK television's Thank Your Lucky Stars to promote their new single,
Please Please
Me,
and were seen by six million viewers. It was a pivotal moment in their career, at the start
of a year in which they would spearhead a working-class assault on music, fashion and
the peripheral arts. Please Please Me, with its distinctive harmonies and
infectious group beat, soon topped the UK charts. It signalled the
imminent overthrow of the solo singer in favour of an irresistible wave of Mersey
talent.

From this point, the Beatles progressed artistically and
commercially with each successive record. After seven weeks at the top with
From Me To You, they released the strident,
wailing She Loves You, a rocker with the catchphrase "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" that was
echoed in ever more frequent newspaper headlines. She Loves You hit number 1,
dropped down, then returned to the top seven weeks later as
Beatlemania gripped the nation.

It was at this point that the
Beatles became a household name. She Loves You was replaced by
I Want To Hold Your Hand, which had UK advance sales of over one million and
entered the charts at number 1. The photographer for the album sleeve of
Please Please
Me was the celebrated surrealist
& theatre specialist, Angus McBean (more on his life
here).

'The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you.'- John Lennon

Until 1964, America had proven a barren ground for aspiring British pop artists,
with only the occasional record such as the
Tornados'
Telstar
making any impression. The Beatles changed that abruptly and decisively.
I Want To Hold Your Hand was helped by the band's television
appearance on the top-rated
Ed Sullivan Show and soon surpassed UK sales. The Beatles had reached a
level of popularity that even outshone their pre-eminence in Britain. By
April, they held the first five places in the Billboard Hot 100, while in
Canada they boasted nine records in the Top 10.

Although the Beatles' chart
statistics were fascinating in themselves, they barely reflected
the group's importance. They had established Liverpool as the pop music
capital of the world and the beat boom soon spread from the
UK across to the USA. In common with
Bob Dylan,
the Beatles had taught the world that pop music could be
intelligent and was worthy of serious consideration beyond the screaming hordes
of teendom.

Beatles badges, dolls, chewing gum and even cans of Beatle breath
showed the huge rewards that could be earned with the sale of merchandising
goods. Perhaps most importantly of all, however, they broke the
Tin Pan Alley monopoly of songwriting by steadfastly composing their own
material. From the moment they rejected Mitch Murray's How Do You Do It? in
favour of their own
Please Please Me, Lennon and McCartney set in motion revolutionary
changes in the music publishing industry.

By
1965, Lennon and McCartney's writing had matured to a startling
degree and their albums were relying less on outside
material. Previously, they had recorded compositions by
Chuck Berry,
Buddy Holly,
Carl Perkins,
Bacharach And David,
Leiber And Stoller
and
Goffin And King, but with each
successive release the group were leaving behind their earlier
influences and moving towards uncharted pop territory. They
carried their audience with them, and even while following
traditional pop routes they always invested their work with originality.

Their
first two films, A Hard Day's Night (buy:
dvd us - dvd uk)
and Help!
(buy:
dvd us -
video us), were not the usual pop celluloid cash-ins but were witty and
inventive, and achieved critical acclaim as well as box office
success. The national affection bestowed upon the loveable mop-tops was
best exemplified in 1965, when they were awarded MBEs for services to British industry. The
year ended with the release of their first double-sided
number 1 single, We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper, the coupling indicating
how
difficult it had become to choose between a- and b-sides.

'The Beatles saved the world from boredom.'- George Harrison

At Christmas 1965 the Beatles released
Rubber Soul,
an album that was not a collection of would-be hits or favourite cover
versions, as the previous releases had been, but a startlingly diverse
collection, ranging from the pointed satire of Nowhere Man to the intensely
reflective In My Life. As ever with the Beatles, there were some
pointers to their future styles, including
Harrison's use of sitar on the punningly titled tale of Lennon's infidelity,
Norwegian Wood.

That same year, the
Byrds,
Yardbirds
and
Rolling Stones incorporated Eastern-influenced sounds into their work, and the
music press
tentatively mentioned the decidedly unpoplike
Ravi Shankar.
Significantly, Shankar's champion, George Harrison, was allowed two
writing credits on
Rubber Soul, Think For Yourself and If I Needed Someone
(also a hit for the
Hollies).

During 1966, the Beatles continued performing their increasingly complex
arrangements before scarcely controllable screaming fans, but the novelty of
fandom was wearing frustratingly thin. In Tokyo, the group incurred the
wrath of militant students who objected to their performance at
Budokan. Several death threats followed and the group left Japan in
poor spirits, unaware that worse was to follow. A visit to Manila ended in a
near riot when , the Beatles did not attend a party thrown by President
Ferdinand Marcos, and before leaving the country they were set
upon by angry patriots.

A few weeks later Beatles records were being burned in
the redneck southern states of America because of Lennon's flippant remark that:
"We are more popular than Jesus now". Although his words passed unnoticed in
Britain, their reproduction in an American magazine instigated
assassination threats and a massed campaign by members of the
Ku Klux Klan to stamp out the Beatle menace. By the summer of 1966, the group were
exhausted and defeated and played their last official performance at
Candlestick Park, San Francisco, USA, on 29 August.

The attendant
album,
Revolver, was equally varied, with Harrison's caustic Taxman,
McCartney's plaintive For No One and Here, There And Everywhere, and
Lennon's drug-influenced I'm Only Sleeping, She Said She Said and
the mantric Tomorrow Never Knows. The latter has been
described as the most effective evocation of a LSD experience ever
recorded. After 1966, the Beatles retreated into the studio, no longer
bound by the restriction of having to perform live. Their image
as pin-up pop stars was also undergoing a metamorphosis and when they next
appeared in photographs, all four had moustaches, and Lennon even boasted glasses,
his short-sightedness previously concealed by contact lenses.

Their first
recording
to be released in over six months was Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, which
broke their long run of consecutive UK number 1 hits, as it was kept off the top
by
Engelbert
Humperdinck's schmaltzy
Release Me.
Nevertheless, this landmark single brilliantly captured the
talents of Lennon and McCartney and is seen as their greatest pairing on
disc. Although their songwriting styles were increasingly
contrasting, there were still striking similarities, as both songs
were about the Liverpool of their childhood. Lennon's lyrics to
Strawberry Fields Forever, however, dramatized a far more complex
inner dialogue, characterized by stumbling qualifications ("That is, I think, I disagree").

Musically, the songs were similarly intriguing, with Penny Lane including a
piccolo trumpet and shimmering percussive fade-out, while Strawberry Fields Forever
fused two different versions of the same song and used reverse-taped
cellos to eerie effect.

'I knew the words to 25 rock songs, so I got in the group. Long Tall Sally and Tutti-Frutti, that got me in. That was my audition. - Paul McCartney

It was intended that this single would be the jewel in the crown of their
next album, but by the summer of 1967 they had sufficient material to
release 13 new tracks on
Sgt. Peppers Lonely
Hearts Club Band.
Sgt. Pepper
turned out to be no mere pop album but a cultural icon embracing the
constituent elements of the 60s' youth culture: pop art, garish fashion, drugs,
instant mysticism and freedom from parental control. Although the Beatles had
previously experimented with collages on
Beatles For Sale and Revolver, they took the idea further on the sleeve of
Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, which included photos of
every
influence on their lives that they could remember. The album had a gatefold
sleeve, cardboard cut-out figurines, and, for the first time on a pop record,
printed lyrics.

The music, too, was even more extraordinary and refreshing. Instead
of the traditional breaks between songs, one track merged into the
next, linked by studio talk, laughter, electronic noises and animal sounds. A
continuous chaotic activity of sound ripped forth from the ingenuity of their
ideas translator, George Martin.
The songs were essays in innovation and
diversification, embracing the cartoon psychedelia of
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, the music-hall pastiche of When I'm Sixty-Four,
the circus atmosphere of Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, the eastern
philosophical promise of Within You, Without You and even a modern morality
tale in She's Leaving Home. Audio tricks and surprises
abounded, involving steam organs, orchestras, sitars, and even a
pack of foxhounds in full cry at the end of Good Morning, Good Morning.

The album
closed with the epic A Day In The Life, the Beatles most ambitious work to
date, featuring what Lennon described as "a sound building up from
nothing to the end of the world". As a final gimmick, the orchestra
was recorded beyond a 20,000 hertz frequency, meaning that the final note was audible
only to dogs. Even the phonogram was not
allowed to interfere with the proceedings, for a record
groove was cut back to repeat slices of backwards-recorded tape that played
on into
infinity.

While Sgt.
Peppers Lonely
Hearts Club Band topped the album charts, the group
appeared on a live worldwide television broadcast, playing their
anthem of the period, All You Need Is Love. The following week it
entered many of the world's charts at number 1, echoing the
old days of Beatlemania.

There was sadness, too, that summer, for on
27 August 1967, Brian Epstein was found dead, the victim of a
cumulative overdose of the drug Carbatrol, together with
hints of a homosexual scandal cover-up. With spiritual
guidance from the
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles took Epstein's death calmly
and decided to look after their business affairs without a manager.

The first
fruit of their post-Epstein labour was the film
Magical Mystery Tour
(buy:
dvd us -
cd uk), first screened on national television on Boxing Day 1967. While the
phantasmagorical movie received mixed reviews, nobody could
complain about the music, initially released in the unique form of a
double EP, featuring six well-crafted songs. The EPs
reached number 2 in the UK, making chart history in the process. Ironically,
the package was robbed of the top spot by the traditional Beatles
Christmas single, this time in the form of Hello Goodbye.

'I can't deal with the press; I hate all those Beatles questions'
- Paul McCartney

In 1968, the Beatles became increasingly involved with the business of
running their company, Apple Corps. A mismanaged boutique near
Baker Street came and went. The first Apple single,
Hey Jude,
was a warm-hearted ballad that progressed over its seven-minute duration
into a rousing singalong finale. Their next film,
Yellow Submarine, was a cartoon, and the graphics were
acclaimed as a landmark in animation. The
soundtrack album was half
instrumental, with George Martin responsible for some interesting orchestral work. Only
four genuinely new Beatles tracks were included, with Lennon's biting
Hey Bulldog being the strongest. Harrison's swirling
Only A Northern Song had some brilliant Pepperesque brass and trumpets.
Although It's All Too Much was flattered by the magnificent
colour of the animation in the film, it was not a strong song.

With their
prolific output, the group crammed the remainder of their most
recent material onto a double album,
The Beatles
(now
known as
The White Album),
released in a stark white cover. George
Martin's perceptive overview many years later was that it
would have made an excellent single album. It had some brilliant moments that
displayed the broad sweep of the Beatles' talent, from Back In The USSR,
the affectionate tribute to
Chuck Berry and the
Beach Boys,
to Lennon's tribute to his late mother, Julia, and McCartney's excellent
Blackbird.

Harrison contributed While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which
featured Eric Clapton
on guitar. Marmalade
took Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da to number 1 in the UK, while Helter Skelter took on symbolic
force in the mind of the mass murderer
Charles Manson.
There were also a number of average songs that seemed still to require work, plus
some ill-advised doodlings such as Revolution No. 9 and Goodnight.

The Beatles revealed that the four musicians were already working in isolated
neutrality, although the passage of time has now made this work a
critics' favourite.

Meanwhile, the Beatles' inability as business executives was
becoming apparent from the parlous state of Apple, to which
Allen Klein
attempted to restore some order. The new realism that permeated the portals
of their headquarters was even evident in their art. Like several other
contemporary artists, including Bob Dylan and the Byrds, they chose to
end the 60s
with a reversion to less complex musical forms.

The return-to-roots minimalism
was spearheaded by the appropriately titled number 1 single Get Back, which
featured
Billy Preston
(essential Billy Preston cd:
Ultimate Collection)
on organ. Cameras were present at their next recording sessions, as they ran
through dozens of songs, many of which they had not played since
Hamburg. When the sessions ended, there were countless spools of tape
that were not reassembled until the following year.

In the meantime, a select few
witnessed the band's last "public" performance on the rooftop of the Apple headquarters
in Savile Row, London. Amid the uncertainty of 1969, the Beatles
enjoyed their final UK number 1 with The Ballad Of John And Yoko, on which only
Lennon and McCartney performed.

In a sustained attempt to cover the cracks that were becoming increasingly
visible in their personal and musical relationships, they
reconvened for
Abbey Road.
The album was dominated by a glorious song cycle on
side 2, in which such fragmentary compositions as Mean Mr. Mustard,
Polythene Pam, She Came In Through The Bathroom Window and Golden
Slumbers/Carry That Weight gelled into a convincing whole. The accompanying
single coupled Lennon's Come Together with Harrison's Something. The latter song gave Harrison the kudos he deserved, and
rightly became the second most covered Beatles song ever, after Yesterday.
The single only reached number 4 in the UK, the band's lowest chart position since
Love Me Do in 1962.

Such considerations were small compared to
the fate of their other songs. The group could only watch helplessly as a wary
Dick James surreptitiously sold Northern Songs to ATV. The catalogue
continued to change hands over the following years and not even the
combined financial force of McCartney and
Yoko Ono could eventually wrest it
from superstar speculator
Michael Jackson.

With various solo projects on the horizon, the Beatles stumbled through 1970, their
disunity betrayed to the world in the depressing film
Let It Be,
which shows Harrison and Lennon
clearly unhappy about McCartney's attitude towards the band. The
subsequent album, finally pieced together by producer
Phil
Spector,
was a controversial and bitty affair, initially housed in a
cardboard box containing a lavish paperback book, which increased the
retail price to a prohibitive level.

Musically, the work revealed the Beatles looking
back to better days. It included the sparse Two Of Us and the primitive The One
After 909, a song they used to play as the Quarrymen, and an
orchestrated The Long And Winding Road, which provided their
final US number 1, although McCartney pointedly preferred the non-orchestrated
version in the film.

There was also the aptly titled last official single, Let It Be,
which entered the UK charts at number 2, only to drop to number 3 the following week. For
many it was the final, sad anti-climax before the inevitable, yet still
unexpected, split. The acrimonious dissolution of the Beatles, like that of no
other group before or since, symbolized the end of an era that
they had dominated and helped to create.

I definitely did look up to John. We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest'
- Paul McCartney

It is inconceivable that any group in the future can shape and influence a
generation in the same way as these four individuals. More than
40 years on, the quality of the songs is such that none show signs of sounding either
lyrically or musically dated.

Since the break-up of the band, there have been some
important releases for Beatles fans. In 1988, the two
Past Masters
volumes collected together all the
Beatles tracks not available on the CD releases of their original albums. The
first volume
has 18 tracks from 1962-65; the
second, 15 from the subsequent years.
Live At The BBC collected together
56 tracks played live by the Beatles for various shows on the
BBC Light Programme in the infancy of their career. Most of the songs are
cover versions of 50s R&B standards, including nine by Chuck Berry.

The first
volume of
Anthology,
released in November 1995,
collected 52 previously unreleased out-takes and demo versions recorded
between 1958 and 1964, plus eight spoken tracks taken from
interviews. The album was accompanied by an excellent six-part
television series that told the complete story of the band, made with the
help of the three remaining Beatles, and by the single
release of Free As A Bird, the first song recorded by the band since
their break-up. This consisted of a 1977 track sung by Lennon into a tape
recorder, and backed vocally and instrumentally in 1995 by the other three Beatles
and produced by
Jeff Lynne. It
narrowly failed to reach number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, as did the
slightly inferior Real Love in March 1996.

The reaction to
Anthology 2 was ecstatic. While it was expected that
older journalists would write favourably about their generation, it was
encouraging to see younger writers offering some fresh views. David Quantick of the
New Musical Express offered one of the best comments in
recent years:

"The Beatles only made - they could only make - music that referred
to the future. And that is the difference between them and every other pop group or
singer ever since".

Anthology 3 could not improve
upon the previous collection but there were gems to be found. The acoustic
While My Guitar Gently Weeps from Harrison is stunning.
Because, never an outstanding track when it appeared on
Abbey Road,
is given a stripped a cappella treatment. The McCartney demo of
Come And Get It for
Badfinger
begs
the question of why the Beatles chose not to release this classic pop
song themselves.

'Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard'
- Paul McCartney

In 1999, more mass media coverage came with the release of a
remixed
Yellow Submarine. The remastered film delighted a new
audience stunned by its still incredibly original effects. The
accompanying album dispensed with the George Martin instrumentals and
instead reverted to the order of tracks featured in the film. Later
in the year they were confirmed as the most successful recording act of the
twentieth century in the USA, with album sales of over 106 million. The following
year saw further Beatles activity. The long awaited but
overpriced
Anthology book, on which all three surviving Beatles collaborated
with Yoko Ono, was published in October. A month
later, their 27 number 1 hits were compiled on
1. Though the compilation was a
huge commercial success, close scrutiny reveals that classic tracks
such as Please Please Me and the magnificent Strawberry Fields Forever have
to be omitted as they never reached the top of the UK or
US charts.

In the course of history the Rolling Stones and countless other major
groups are loved, but the Beatles are universally and unconditionally
adored. This was further proved in November 2001 when George Harrison lost his
battle with cancer. The worldwide mourning resulted in massive
coverage in the press and on radio and television. After this, Lennon's famously
flippant 1966 comment about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus Christ should be taken
very seriously indeed.